Do you have special war mementos? Send photos to sendphoto@cleveland.com to be featured online in our gallery!

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Time has a way of eroding memories of the past in waves of new life experiences and circumstances.

But some families of veterans have a bulwark against this onslaught, in the artifacts and mementos that endure long after the military service has ended and those proud vets are gone.

These reminders can be faded photos and tarnished medals. A diary or letters that preserve a veteran’s exact thoughts and observations. An old gun, or a crumpled service cap.

All evoke a loved one’s past, and their legacy for future generations.

Battered bits of family history

On Feb. 7, 1945, a crippled B-25 bomber dropped from the sky and staggered toward the Swiss Alps. A huge chunk of its left wing had been shot out by German antiaircraft fire during a bombing raid over northern Italy in World War II.

Bombs, guns, anything heavy was jettisoned by the crew in the hopes of lightening the plane so it could reach Switzerland – a sanctuary where they’d be imprisoned as POWs, but at least not executed by the Germans, as had happened to other downed American airmen.

Among that crew was Staff Sgt. Joseph Brentar, a tailgunner from Cleveland aboard a bomber nicknamed “The Big Swing” making its final flight and Brentar’s 17th mission.

All six crewmen bailed out before the plane crashed into a mountain, and were captured by the Swiss (who were neutral in the war). They spent a short time in captivity before returning home.

Now, seven months after Brentar’s death at age 89, those chunks of twisted metal are treasured along with other artifacts and photos of the airman by his daughter, Joanne Brentar Hottois, 60, of Bainbridge Township.

She recalled that when her father talked about the crash, he’d vividly describe pounding and pounding on the small escape hatch near the airplane’s tail until it opened and he parachuted to safety.

She said that when he was asked what he was thinking about as he dropped toward the mountain slopes, he replied, “You don’t think about it, you just do it.”

This realistic attitude characterized his childhood when he started working at the Central Market when he was 8 to help support his family during the Depression, and worked nights while attending East Technical High School.

Brentar, one of the family’s five boys who entered the service during and after the war, later had a distinguished career as deputy chief probation officer with the Cuyahoga County Criminal Court. He and his wife, Joanne, lived in Gates Mills and raised three children.

His daughter recalled that when the former flier talked about the war, “he’d say a lot of guys had it worse than he had. He survived, and he felt himself very lucky.”

Now that he’s gone, the artifacts of his service take on even more meaning, she said.

“I feel like it’s a part of my father, and we’re going to safeguard them out of respect for his service,” she said. “Those guys sacrificed so much, and I can’t imagine the things they went through.

“We have a large extended family and these things will stay in the family,” she added. “We’re all proud of him. He was just an amazing guy.”

Artistic greetings from Italy

One day during World War II, a very special and unexpected package arrived from Jimmy Gilmour, a U.S. Army infantryman fighting in Italy.

His fiancée Aileen Gilmour, now 89, of Willowick, was thrilled with the surprise for her. Inside the package was an oil painting of her -- an artistic version of a photo that Jimmy always carried with him, and had commissioned from an Italian artist for the price of 10 chocolate bars.

The painting still hangs in her bedroom, a reminder of a loved one who left for war, and 42 years of marriage before her husband’s death at 67 in 1988.

He was a street-smart kid from Cleveland, she recalled. He once told her that when he was being shipped overseas, he noticed that soldiers were put to work on kitchen duty while sailors were not. So for $10 he “rented” an outfit from one of the sailors, and never got tagged for KP for the remainder of the voyage.

He also told her about the time he got wounded in the hand and a doctor told him that two fingers would have to be amputated. She recalled, “As he said, ‘Doc, if I wake up and those fingers are gone, it may take the rest of my life but I’ll find you and kill you.’ ”

The fingers stayed – a bit crooked for Gilmour’s remaining years, but good enough for pipefitter’s work.

She still has a parachute used for dropping flares that he brought home from the service, his medals including two Purple Hearts, and photos of him visiting Rome during the war. But the painting is her favorite . . . mostly.

“I don’t like the way he (the artist) enlarged my nose into a Roman nose. I have a little Irish nose,” she said with a chuckle. “Oh well, you take what you get.”

A brother lost and forever missing

On Oct. 11, 1956, a U.S. military transport plane flying from an air base in England, carrying 59 airmen and Navy personnel, went down in the Atlantic Ocean.

There were no survivors, no cause ever determined for the crash, and nothing but a few photos and fading memories for Raymond Lipina to remember his older brother by.

That changed last August when Lipina, 73, of Brunswick, had a headstone for his brother Robert placed in a special section of the Ohio Western Reserve National Cemetery. Nobody is buried in that section, which is reserved just for the markers of veterans who went missing in action or during their service.

“Even though it’s 57 years later (after his brother’s death), now I have a place I can go to and remember,” Lipina said. “It brings back a lot of memories.”

Lipina was only 16, a student at West Tech High School (which his brother also attended), when news came of the plane crash, which also claimed the life of another local Airman Second Class, John DiSanto of Euclid.

Lipina said their father had died 12 years earlier so Robert, two years older, became a father figure to him. “I looked up to him,” he added. “I learned a lot of good things, and some not-so-good things from him.”

Though both worked as teens to help support the family, there were fun times. “We’d play in our twin beds, play the Lone Ranger and Tonto, the goofy stuff brothers do,” Lipina recalled.

The loss devastated their mother. “My mother never let go of the memory of my brother,” Lipina said. She often talked about him until dementia claimed her memories and she died in 2005, he added.

While arranging for his brother’s headstone at the national cemetery, Lipina discovered that his uncle, a veteran buried at Calvary Cemetery, also had no military marker.

Now he does.

“When you get older, things that weren’t important when you were young become important,” he said. “That’s just the way it is.”

The lingering guns of war

Tom Matowitz still has the Luger pistol and Iron Cross medal that his father’s cousin, Frank Matowitz, took from a captured German officer during World War II.

They’re the physical souvenirs of a relationship that spanned many years, as the old veteran shared his stories of battles across North Africa, Sicily and Italy, with a youth who never tired of hearing them.

“He had a profound influence upon me growing up,” said Thomas Matowitz, 56, of Mentor. “All these years later, hardly a day passes without my thinking of him.”

Frank was a member of the U.S. Army’s 91st Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, who fought overseas for 30 straight months, hit the beach on three amphibious invasions, was wounded, and received six battle stars.

Before the Berea resident died in 1989 at age 66, he was able to provide his insight on combat for the younger Matowitz, who once had the temerity to repeatedly press the old soldier about how it felt to shoot someone. “A hell of a lot better than if the SOB shot me,” the veteran finally growled.

His stories often reflected the grim realities of war. How sheer luck could keep you alive, as when Matowitz triggered a land mine, knew he should be a goner, but the mine had been ruined by exposure to snow and rain.

Or the time he called in an artillery barrage on what appeared to be a plainly Red-Cross-marked German field hospital. A unit officer was furious until Matowitz --who had previously noticed that all the incoming hospital “patients” seemed to be mules laden with ammunition – suggested a moment’s wait. Sure enough, when the first rounds hit, they spectacularly set off what had been a concealed ammo dump.

Or the haunting memory of the young German soldiers, still in their teens, that Matowitz captured. An officer ordered them shot. Matowitz refused. So the officer shot them himself.

Tom Matowitz remembered an incident long after the war, when he and the old vet took a .22 rifle out to a barn to take care of some troublesome rats.

The former combat infantryman missed an easy shot, and wordlessly handed over the rifle. Matowitz recalled, “He walked quickly away and told me later that at that moment, the thought of shooting anything, even a rat, made him sick.

“Apart from rare occasions when he showed me the Luger pistol, it was the only time in my life I ever saw him with a gun.”

A book for great-grandpa

The old black and white photo shows Cpl. Ted Perzynski standing in front of one of the fighters that he serviced in England as an Army Air Forces mechanic during World War II.

When Holly Perzynski, of South Euclid, saw that photo of her great-grandfather, she noticed something perhaps only a 10-year-old would -- his pants were too long.

“In World War II the soldiers did not always have clothes that fit right. They are folded over and over and they are still too long,” she wrote two years ago in a 12-page book, “My Great-Grandpa was in World War II.”

The book was the result of a class assignment at the Sacred Heart of Jesus Academy to make a presentation about something from the decade of the Forties. She chose her late great-grandfather, who died in 1988 at age 72, and World War II.

She went through a box of his photos and other military service artifacts to make a slide show that her father, Adam Perzynski, helped her convert to a small e-book (available online for 99 cents).

The book includes photos of her great-grandfather and fellow GIs, airplanes, a food ration card, and bombed-out German cathedral that he visited. A picture of four smiling women perched on a fighter wing prompted her comment, “It looks like fun to sit up on the airplane. At the end of the war, people were happy.”

Her father said the book was intended as a fun project but also has an important role in teaching future generations about the past. “It’s one thing for me to have known him and known about the war, but to my kids they could have been just a bunch of pictures and a box of artifacts,” he said. “Sometimes the stories get lost.”

Holly, now 12, said she not only learned about the war, but about the role her great-grandfather played in it. “I didn’t know how much he did,” she said. “I think he was a pretty neat guy.”

And in her book, she offers another observation: “My great-grandpa used to say he fought this war so his grandkids and great-grandkids would not ever have to go to war.”

A Doughboy’s diary

"Sept. 29, 1918: We are sleeping in German dugouts in an engineer dump. Many Germans and Americans are lying around dead. Two have heads blown off. Was on burying detail today. We are living in filth. But a warm fire keeps us up. The stiffs don’t bother us any.”

The words were written in a combat diary kept by Joseph Michael Keyes Sr., of Cleveland, detailing his service in France and Belgium as a U.S. Army engineer during World War I.

His granddaughter, Keli Keyes, 58, of Euclid, made copies of the diary after his death in 1961, and made sure the whole family got one.

“It always fascinated me,” she said. “He writes about the horses that died, the explosions. It sounds like something right out of the movies.”

“It has turned cold and the wounded are suffering terribly. The Huns are dropping shells pretty regularly around here . . . Everybody talks of peace and the good old USA all the time. Nobody wants peace more than the soldier and the Hun prisoners say the end is in sight. They are sick of it and we are making them sicker.”

The original diary now belongs to the old Doughboy’s son, Bob Keyes, 62, of Wickliffe, who was only 10 years old when his father died but still remembers sitting on the vet’s lap, pretending to drive the car. He also recalled times when his father soaked a shrapnel-wounded leg in the tub.

“He was a very loving, all-around good guy,” he said.

The diary is not only a document of war, but a testament to a family history. As Keyes noted, “Important? Absolutely. It’s an artifact from our past.”

The Keyes’ past, and America’s bygone days of sacrifice.

“Nov. 11, 1918: Lt. Downing tells us the armistice is signed. Shells whizzed over us last night but now all is quiet. All are anxious. Hoping it is true. We want peace and nobody can blame us after what we have gone through.”

A Purple Heart still beats for veteran’s family

To Jamie Hoffee, his grandfather’s Purple Heart medal is more than just an old family heirloom destined to gather dust in some forgotten drawer.

It’s something to be displayed and treasured as a representation of Charles Schumacher’s service as a C-47 cargo plane pilot during World War II who battled hazardous weather and the Japanese to deliver supplies from India to Burma and China over the towering Himalayan mountains (“the hump” as it was called then.)

But Hoffee, 36, of Perry Township near Canton, said it’s also a tangible reminder of the service and sacrifices of all veterans.

“People can forget the stories, and at least this is something visual that shows that this guy, and many others, did something to serve our country,” he noted. “They’re being forgotten and people don’t realize what they did for us.”

Hoffee said his grandfather told him that he got the Purple Heart after being hit in the leg by Japanese gunfire.

It was one of several wartime experiences his grandfather told to him, according to Hoffee. “I feel like I was very lucky to be there for his stories,” he added.

The veteran’s daughter, Pamela Schumacher, 61, of Canton, recalled that before his death in 2003 at age 79, “He’d talk about the war all the time. Whenever he came over, the subject was always the war. Sometimes they were the same stories, but you never got tired of hearing them.”

She said the Purple Heart was his treasured possession but disappeared for a while after her mother died in 1997 and her father gave it to a friend he started dating.

Schumacher and her son were able to track it down last summer and add it to the other medals and artifacts he brought home from the war.

“It’s part of who and what we are,” she said. “He had so much devotion and care for his country, and that carries on to his children and grandchildren.”

Follow Us

cleveland.com is powered by Plain Dealer Publishing Co. and Northeast Ohio Media Group. All rights reserved (About Us).The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Northeast Ohio Media Group LLC.